Digitas UK launches consulting arm for experience transformation

Digitas UK is launching an experience-transformation consulting service in which the agency’s senior planners lead on tackling brands’ "disconnection" with customers.

The service, called Experience Consulting, is meant to reflect the Publicis Groupe agency’s connected experience proposition and its approach to transformation.

The agency said the need for brands to rethink how they create and deliver customer experiences is clear, citing internal research that found 78% of UK consumers believe technology makes it easier to connect with brands but only 40% of brands are making the most of this opportunity.

The agency’s chief strategy officer Matt Holt will lead Experience consulting and working with strategy partner Dave Lowe and strategy director Valeria Corna. The three senior planners are tasked with bringing together the agency’s business consultants with digital platform specialists and creatives in order to deliver connected experiences for clients.

The team will use a newly-developed tool called the Connected Experience Audit Tool, which evaluates a brand’s customer experiences across criteria like "totality", "memorability" and "utility" in order to identify a brand’s areas for improvements and the operational changes needed to make them happen.

Holt said: "We believe connected experience is the next frontier for customer experience. The inconvenient truth is that customers don’t care about the siloes or systems within the brand organisation. To them the brand is the product is the experience, so we need to create experiences that are truly connected, coherent and memorable."

Digitas UK's chief executive Dani Bassil completed the hiring of her top team last month, having hired Lida managing director Claire Cootes for the same role. The digital agency is also growing its customer engagement proposition, having restructured and shed staff in 2018.